Photography

Intersection | Prospect Heights returns this month with a panel discussion and series of tours to launch Our Places, a new booklet presenting stories and concerns of current and former neighbors, tracking development and demographic change, and looking at how it plays out on our streets. What is the future of Prospect Heights and our city?

Talking with organizers, politicians and planners about the experience of change in Prospect Heights, and what it implies for neighborhoods across the city facing large-scale development. How do we preserve community?

Guided tours : June 11 & June 18
Meet @ Met Food, 632 Vanderbilt Ave., between Park Place & Prospect Place
Join us for creative walking tours telling the new and old Intersection stories in sites around the neighborhood. How these are similar or different to your own stories?

We installed almost 20 Intersection|Prospect Heights popup exhibitions in everyday places all around Prospect Heights. These included the supermarket, the library, the hardware store, dry cleaners and bars, among other places. One of the highlights of the project was forming relationships with these businesses and the ways that they came to host the project, and in many sites, to really support it, look out for it, and feel proud of it.

Met Food. The place that kept me going in my research, which David told me “talks more about the sense of community” than anywhere else, and the place to which I was most thrilled to see these stories and photographs brought back, almost 15 years later. Frank and Abdul, community-builders, and incredibly supportive people in this project. Not to mention hosts who on our guided tours provided all participants with bananas. Amazing.

Caree Cleaners.

Kimchi Grill, where our neighborhood stories were right next to another essential – hot sauce.

Pintchik Hardware.

COLOR Bklyn. They shared their last months on Washington Avenue with us, and valiantly put the project out on the street everyday, protecting it from wind and rain, and helping us to engage people passing by on the street.

The legendary El Gran Castillo de Jagua – even in its new location, still a major community landmark, and one of the most popular popup exhibitions.

Brooklyn Public Library. One of the most wonderful parts of this project was working with BPL, and finding all the synergies between Intersection and all the amazing initiatives going on at BPL – from the Brooklyn Transitions series to the Brooklyn Collection to Our Streets, Our Stories, and beyond. The installation above was in the Central Branch’s children’s room, where we got some of the most heartfelt stories contributed, including the one below.

There’s much to say on the kinds of experiences we had and the kinds of conversations we were privileged to be a part of, but for now – we thought you’d like to see a little of what the process of bringing the project to the public was like. A few of our favorite moments of making it happen, in pictures.

Reconnecting with our tour guides from 15 years ago. Here Mike Halkias of the Usual reads his own guide, and remarks on how much more hair he has in the cover picture.

Receiving the printers proofs for all six of our guidebooks – seeing them all together finally, in living color. Holding the dummy proofs in our hands – feeling what the guides might really feel like – one of the best days of 2015.

The guides and pop-up exhibitions come together – with places for people to leave their own stories.

Thrilling to bring one of our very favorite images back to the neighborhood. We’ve loved this boy since Gabrielle photographed him at the Conrad McRae basketball tournament at the Dean Street playground in 2002.

Installation began at Brooklyn Public Library – and shortly after setting down our first pop-up, it was so gratifying to see this man be the first to pick up a guidebook.

Once people started to pick up those guides, the pop-ups needed to be refilled regularly – much to our delight. While the installations at BPL and Met Food needed to be refilled most often, all of the locations required our regular trips around the neighborhood with the artists’ best friend, a shopping cart. Public art is glamorous – and we were happy for a very mild autumn!

We want to thank all the journalists who took our Intersection|Prospect Heights project to heart and wrote such enthusiastic articles about it in the fall of 2015. These thoughtful writers came to so many of the public events, taking part, taking notes, thinking deeply about the questions of development, displacement and sustainability through the project’s personal stories.

A year ago, I thought to myself, “it’s time to go back to the supermarket!” Not just any supermarket. No – a supermarket on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, around which a neighborhood has changed dramatically. I was thinking about how we critically need nuanced conversations on sense of place, community representation, displacement and sustainability. Prospect Heights is a microcosm of the gentrification and large-scale development pressures facing Brooklyn today, with a marked decrease in African American residents over the past fifteen years, and a marked increase in residents with incomes over $100,000. Over the next ten years, as the Atlantic Yards and infill developments come to completion, the population will be up to 70% larger.

What does all this mean? How do we talk about it, argue about it, and even laugh and cry about it? This October, using the deep ethnographic and photographic work I began 15 years ago with the Guided Tours project, Buscada, in partnership with PHNDC and the Brooklyn Public Library, are set to launch a new public art & dialogue project to do just that.

Intersection | Prospect Heights is a series of unofficial, idiosyncratic and personal guidebooks, popup exhibitions around the neighborhood (especially at the supermarket!), creative walks, and public dialogues. We hope you’ll take part in the project to travel back in time, back to the supermarket, and laugh and cry with us – about the past and future of Prospect Heights, as well as that of other neighborhoods around the city facing these same pressures.

More info coming soon – but mark your calendars for the project opening & our first public dialogue on October 7th, 6:30pm!

If there were one thing that talks more about this community than anything else, it’s probably the supermarket, you know? Because of the people that are there and what they try to do. They do it to make money, granted, but they do it because they seem very happy to be here…concerned about people, concerned about delivering service to the neighborhood–to the whole neighborhood. It’s not that they came in and decided, ‘Oh, we’re getting rid of the Goya stuff here, you know? We’re going upscale.’ No. Still got ham hocks there. It’s what made this neighborhood for us. 25 years ago we got very lucky on the house, but really it’s the fact that it’s a comfortably mixed neighborhood. Now… I can’t pull down my veil of ignorance… Yeah, I’m part of the dominant society, but it just feels to me like a comfortably mixed neighborhood.– David

In 2001, I began a project in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, which I called Guided Tours. In this work I asked neighborhood residents to take me on tour of “their” Prospect Heights. I was interested in understanding people’s experiences of their everyday neighborhoods, and had a feeling that within very common spaces very complex ideas about identity, neighborhood and the world were getting worked out. That work became the basis for my dissertation, Guided Tours: The Layered Dynamics of Self, Place and Image in Two American Neighborhoods, and for journal articles in Space & Culture and Society & Space, as well as spurring me to ask similar questions in a neighborhood across the country, in Oakland, CA.

In this work, I considered the powerful potential for dialogue through photographs of the everyday, and how bringing people’s everyday worlds back to them might allow them to see those spaces in new ways. Now, I’m returning to this body of work to think about how an archive of the everyday from more than thirteen years ago might help the community talk about the incredible gentrification and change (not least due to the Atlantic Yards / Barclay’s development) that has happened in this neighborhood in the intervening years.

I’m beginning this process by making a selection of the work available online, and through a series of forthcoming blog posts as a way to think about this archive in new ways. As a start, above is a photograph of Met Foods from 2005, with a thought from one of my tour guides that explains how a supermarket might help us begin to talk about the complexity and detail of gentrification and housing segregation in New York.

I was both thrilled and stumped when Radhika Subramaniam and Margot Bouman asked me to contribute to “Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story”, the exhibition now on view at Parsons Sheila Johnson Design Center. Why? Thrilled because I’m a New Yorker, born and bred, I live here now, teach students about cities, and generally have taken New York as a part of my being and birthright. Thrilled because I make photographic and urbanist projects that are all about objects and the emotional meanings vested in objects and buildings – like our Triangle Fire Open Archive and Open Museum, and my Guided Tours and SPURA projects. Thrilled because I loved the British Museum & BBC series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, which Radhika and Margot acknowledge as inspiration for this exhibition. But stumped too, because how could I possibly narrow down the number of objects in this city which have been meaningful to me – and the number I find to be important to tell the city’s own story as intertwined with my own? And of course, to be brutally honest, I wanted to pick something really good.

But what? And how to make it something that only I could really write about? I mulled it over and over, and then, clear as day it came to me. A photograph I had written about before in drafts of my dissertation, diaries, and other places, as the way I imagine New York in my mind’s eye, though daily experience often contradicts it. This photograph of my mother and I standing at a phone booth on Kenmare Street in the early 1980s was taken by my father, and long ago, taken by me out of our family collection and carried with me on trips far and away as a way of remembering home. In this way, my nomination of the phone booth was a double object – both the photograph and the once-ubiquitous phone booths of New York themselves. You can read my full contribution below.

This is a double object. It is both the phone booth pictured (the kind you now see on city streets denuded of their telephones) and it is the photograph itself.

This picture of my mother and me was taken by my father on the corner of Kenmare and Mulberry Streets in the early 1980s. And somehow, this picture has become my image of New York. It is not just the New York of my childhood, but rather this image persists as the way I think of New York now, though I live here still, and can see for myself that this reality is long gone. In my mind, New York is somewhat grey, Datsuns and Plymouths dot the streets, and the sidewalk is patterned with dropped chewing gum (this last may in fact be true.)

Looking at this photograph, I think of both the phone booth and the mother and child using it. Here, we are joined at the booth with our matching umbrellas, but as I got older, phone booths allowed me to stretch that distance between us. I remember my mother’s repeated refrain, as I traveled far to school on my own at age 11 : “Be sure you always have a quarter with you to call if you need me.”

This arrangement seems almost impossible to imagine now, when people give their children cell phones in elementary school. To suggest that a child might roam New York with but a quarter in her pocket as a way to call home (and with no way to call her!) would be unthinkable to many parents I now know.

As I became a teenager, the phone booth was less the way I called home, and more the way I called friends: beeping my first boyfriend from phone booths (so self-important, and so terribly high-tech at the time), and learning the special code (now long forgotten) one could use to find the unlisted phone booth’s number, so someone could call you back.

These ubiquitous booths weren’t beautiful, nor did they always work, but they provided a (sometimes false) sense of privacy in public for conversations, scribbling messages, drunkenness, exhaustion.

New York’s public phone booths waned as my own participation with the public world grew. Now, as an adult, out in the world, and thinking about how my young son will one day call me, these private little spaces from which to reach out to others in the midst of a public street are now only husks, replaced by devices in our pockets, which people imagine envelop them in privacy, but mostly create intersecting bubbles of sound and chatter as we walk down the street.

The RFP for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) site has gone out, the bids from developers are coming in, and it is possible that new things will happen at the SPURA site. My article “Layered SPURA : Spurring Conversations through Visual Urbanism” featured in Radical History Review asks some questions about this process : What of the site’s history? What of the ongoing need for affordable housing? What of the need for thoughtful architecture in the building of all housing? Will these things be heeded in this process? How can thinking these through, and new ways of thinking about contested space, help inform the way we think about and plan for SPURA? “Layered SPURA” explores my four-year visual urbanist project on SPURA, a collaboration with students and community groups to use creative practice to ask complex questions and to reconsider the city.

On January 31, join us at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, for a new exhibition curated and designed by Buscada, and celebrating four years of our work on the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area – and spurring conversation about what’s next for SPURA!

More than forty years ago, New York City took ownership of 14 square blocks on the Lower East Side for urban renewal and “slum clearance.” Its legacy is a row of parking lots on the south side of Delancey Street. Few renewal projects have been so contested, and very few of the originally-planned buildings were built. This is SPURA, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, one of the largest underdeveloped city-owned parcels of land.

The Layered SPURA / City Studio project, headed by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, explores this complex site using a hybrid approach of pedagogy, art and research, and involves long-term collaborations between Lower East Side community organizations and students in Bendiner-Viani’s City Studio, a part of the New School’s Urban Programs. This exhibition, a culmination of four years of student, faculty, and community collaboration, does not suggest solutions for a place beleaguered by top-down planning, but rather hopes to spur new conversations amongst people with different points of view about SPURA’s past, present and future.

The project has collaborated with many local community and art organizations including Good Old Lower East Side, Pratt Center for Community Development, Place Matters, common room, Buscada, Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Art Center and Creative Time.

Support is provided by The Office of Civic Engagement and Social Justice at Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts, The Urban Design & Urban Studies Programs at The New School, and The New School for Public Engagement.

Our 2010 Urban Encounters festival at Tate Britain this past June was a great success, and I thought it worthwhile to reflect on our intentions for this year’s event.

This organization, co-founded by myself and Paul Halliday, and now a Buscada project as well, addresses the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism.

This year’s main event, Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions at Tate Britain on 29 May 2010, was inspired by the multiple meanings of these words : routes and transitions. All of the talks will soon be available for download and listening on iTunes U through Tate Britain, but meanwhile, a short explanation of the intentions an interests behind this year’s main event.

We were particularly interested in both embodied local routes, as well as global flows and the individuals who experience both of these kinds of movements through space – as well as through time.

The other part of this theme – transitions – was been inspired by our interest in change – and its relationship to the city, as well as the city-dweller. What does a still (or even a moving yet finite) visual medium have to say about change? about the change of landscapes? the change or transitions or adaptations made by people themselves, traveling these global and local routes in the processes of migration and life otherwise? Are there traces that can be found, or new geographies made through the visual?

The panels addressed these routes and transitions through three major themes –

Global Routes: Personal & political addressed global routes / global flows of capital, colonialism and war, as they intersect with personal routes and connections through space and time.

Making Transitions: Practice & location considered the ways in which migrants and migrant stories inhabit, and create, locations – from front rooms to municipal buildings, housing developments or the space of radio waves. This panel asked how the process of “making space” is a part of the movement between nations and neighborhoods?

The Remembered Road: Archives & pasts explored the way in which archives from the official to the personal can be read, re-read, or reinterpreted, to find the traces of different kinds of migrant, and mobile, histories – and to understand cities’ multiple pasts.

There are some enormous questions here, and some thrilling answers and provocations were posed by our speakers’ work.

Yet, a mix of dialogue and practice is at the heart of Urban Encounters – we encourage dialogue amongst our panelists as well as with our audience. In building the field of visual urbanism and we hope that you will engage in a dialogue with us. I hope that those of you who were not able to join us at the event will listen to the podcast when it becomes available – and for those that were able to join us at this or past years, please get in touch to continue the dialogue here, via facebook, twitter, or email at info [at] urbanencounters.org.